Another ex-employee of Steven Cohen’s $16 billion hedge fund has been linked to allegations of insider trading.

The news comes as speculation has been growing over whether SAC Capital could get caught up in a sweeping federal probe into illegal trading.

Former SAC Capital analyst Jonathan Hollander became an informant for the Securities and Exchange Commission after profiting from a tip about the 2006 buyout of the Albertsons supermarket chain, Reuters reported yesterday.

Last year, the SEC accused former Blackstone Group investment banker Ramesh Chakrapani of illegally telling a friend about the transaction.

SEC documents only identified the friend as “tippee 1.”

But Reuters said — citing three people familiar with the Chakrapani case — that the mysterious trader is Hollander, who, according to regulators, pocketed $91,000 on the trade for himself and his parents, plus an additional $3.5 million for his firm, CR Instrinsic Investors, a subsidiary of SAC.

The Albertsons case isn’t believed to be linked to the huge probe of hedge fund Galleon Group and its founder Raj Rajaratnam. But other ex-SAC employees have been connected to Galleon.

Last month, Cohen’s ex-wife accused the Greenwich, Conn., billionaire in court documents of admitting to trading on confidential information when they were married in the 1980s.

SAC spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter said the hedge fund conducted its own investigation into Hollander after the SEC charged Chakrapani last January, and that the firm shared its findings with government officials “on its own initiative” in February.